Interview: Yasser Seirawan, Part I

[Hanon W. Russell]

INTERVIEW: YASSER SEIRAWAN
by Hanon W. Russell
Copyright 1993 Hanon W. Russell
All Rights Reserved
Part I of II

American Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan has been one of the top
grandmasters in the United States for well over a decade. Most
recently his fine finish in the U.S. Championship qualified
Yasser, again, for the Interzonals. Seirawan is also well known
as the founder and Editor-In-Chief of the excellent bi-weekly
"Inside Chess." In December, 1992, we inquired if it would be
possible to interview Yasser. The answer came back - Yes, but
since he was then playing in the U.S. Championship being held in
Durango, Colorado, it would have to be scheduled after the
tournament. On Thursday, January 7, 1993, we were in our offices
in Connecticut and Yasser was in his in Seattle. We called him
and he was gracious enough to answer our questions for almost
three hours. The interview was very long and we are presenting
it in two parts. We are now pleased to present part one of our
interview with Yasser Seirawan.

Hanon W. Russell: Yasser, tell me a little bit about how you
first got interested in chess.

Yasser Seirawan: My background is, my father is Arabic, my
mother British. I was born in Syria, Damascus, March 24, 1960.
We stayed in Syria until the civil wars essentially forced us to
flee. We moved to England in '64 and stayed there until '67. My
family moved to Seattle in 1967. Soon after my mother and father
got divorced and the family I lived with, my mother, from '68 to
'70, when she remarried in '70, we travelled all around the
United States, more or less when the rent came due. [Laughs] We
settled in Virginia Beach, Virginia, one of the world's most
beautiful places from '70 to '72. In the summer of '72 we moved
back to Seattle and where my family settled and I have remained.

In 1972 I was a beach-goer while in Virginia, and it rained an
awful lot that particular summer and being kept indoors is how I
picked up the game of chess. I learned it from a paraplegic, a
gentleman upstairs, David Chapman, who taught me the moves and
it became a burning passion of mine to clobber David in a game
of chess. By the time I could do that, there became an awareness
of the fact that Bobby Fischer was fighting for the world
championship against Boris Spassky. When he did win it, I saw
him on the "Johnny Carson Show," and I said to myself, "Well, he
can't be the world champion, because he didn't beat me!" I must
have been quite a cocky kid, but I do remember that thought
running through my head. I guess thereafter I started playing in
tournaments, and the chess clubs really a bit deeply. I remember
winning my first trophy with two wins and three losses and
thinking "I'm on top of the world now!" It just developed
thereafter going from the regional and city tournaments to the
state championship. Eventually I managed to get an invitation to
the U.S. Junior and soon thereafter I was really competing
very, very heavily.

HWR: There is no story, then, that is analogous to the stories
told by Capablanca and Reshevsky about how they were viewing
their father playing chess and, you know the story, the opponent
gave up, the little prodigy climbed up on the chair and then
turned the tables.

YS: I have heard so many of those stories. I tend to think they
are myths. In my case, it was absolutely the worst. I had, in my
view, absolutely no chess talent. It wasn't a question of
solving one of the greatest problem of all times at a glance, it
was a question of - how does the knight move? Keeping in mind
all the various powers of the pieces, I was totally confused. I
lost so many games, Hanon, I can't even remember the time I
scored the first draw because I was just getting clobbered and
clobbered and clobbered.

HWR: There must have come a time, however, when you realized
that your ability to play the game was at least a cut above
everybody else's. When did that happen?

YS: Honestly, it happened a lot later than you may think. Keep
in mind my first tournament was probably the late fall of 1972,
and I got a B player's rating, and I was heavily overrated. It
was on the basis, as I said, of losing more games than I won. I
just played against higher rated people and I got this rating
that was totally undeserved and a full year later I was still a
B player. In Chicago, 1973, I managed to tie for the B player
prize and that bumped me up to A. I really remained an Expert
from '74 to '75, which, again, is nothing spectacular in
anyone's mind, especially mine. I mean, I was getting clobbered
by the local players here in Seattle for many a year, really
earning my spurs. It all came the hard way.

My biggest block was getting from the Expert to Master class. I
remember watching my rating crawl up to 2170. I'm thinking, "I'm
getting so close." I found out my next tournament I was down to
2100, I'd try to crawl back and nothing really happened until
the U.S. Open of 1975, in Lincoln, Nebraska. In that tournament
I scored, I believe, a very credible 8.5 or 9 points out of 12,
but more importantly I played very, very strong competition. I
leapfrogged. I didn't go to the 2200 class, I went to the 2300
class! I was thinking to myself, "I've been struggling so hard
to become a chess master and now I'm an overrated chess master.
I just don't want to be an expert anymore." The weird part about
that is that tournament gave me a great deal of confidence and I
don't believe I ever went below 2300 after Lincoln, although I
could be wrong. It was more or less at that point, it kind of
simultaneously occurred with my U.S. Junior invitation in 1976,
it actually began to click - "Hey, I'm actually one of the
better juniors in the United States and I've made a lot of
progress."

My graduation from high school was in 1977. The real question
becomes, especially when you're sixteen, you're just a sophomore
or junior in high school, "Where am I going to go to college?
What am I going to do for a living?" I was at that point it
began to occur to me more and more that I was in love with
chess, the life of chess, of a professional, and if I had my
'druthers, that's what I wanted to do. That was a choice I made
more or less as a sixteen-year old.

HWR: What was your first indication that you were not only going
to excel perhaps at the regional or national level, but the
international level?

YS: Funnily, it was my 1978 World Junior, which was an absolute
disaster, that convinced me that the chess world was my oyster.
[Laughs] I bombed out, flat out. I played in the world junior,
my first world junior, and I bombed out. The whole atmosphere of
the junior tournament was static for me. The air, the atmosphere
was just electric. I'm playing behind the United States flag.
There were Artur Yusupov, Sergei Dolmatov - the Russian
powerhouses. They had the Soviet flag right there. I just felt
that I was born for this. I mean, it was just such a marvelous
feeling of competing in an international competition,
representing the country, knowing the chess community back home
was following these matches. I was thrilled. The competition was
very difficult for me and I got killed, justifiably so. I think
I finished 14th, way out of the medals.

But that experience convinced me that this was what I wanted to
do, because it was so wonderful and I came back the next year
and won the gold medal and became the World Junior Champion.
That was my invitation to the world stage, because as a World
Junior Champion, suddenly I had a title, which I didn't have, I
was not an International Master and I was not a Grandmaster and
so organizers were not interested in inviting me. With that
World Junior title, I got an invitation to Hastings and Wijk aan
Zee both of which are important traditional tournaments on the
world chess stage. I bombed out at Hastings, but I did manage to
win Wijk aan Zee with Walter Browne. That was it. Then there was
no looking backwards. All kinds of invitations came thereafter.

HWR: Very good. I want to shift at this point to a discussion of
more recent happenings. In particular, chess magazines have come
and gone. There probably have been dozens of chess magazines in
the last several decades. Yours, however, started, it struck a
nerve and appears to have made it. Let's explore that a little
bit. How did you have the idea to start "Inside Chess?"

YS: Well, a lot of factors kind of congealed at a certain
moment. One really never knows why a particular event or series
of events emerges and just spills, but I guess the stars were in
the right shape. Essentially what happened was I was
participating in European events almost continually.

HWR: What time period was this?

YS: From 1980 to 1987. I played all over the world as a chess
professional, I worked with Viktor Korchnoy and I remember
particularly the 1981 year as a year where I spent eleven months
and two weeks away from home. I was in Seattle exactly two
weeks. A very crucial decision became paramount in my life and
that was: Where am I going to live? In other words, if I wanted
to remain a professional chess player, it was quite clear that
Europe was home, because that was where all the major chess
competitions were taking place.

Here in the United States, there was a very, very backward state
of developments and it seemed to me that it was going even
further backward. The chess competition was more intense, the
rewards less and less and I saw more and more of my friends
giving up chess and going into the private world. I saw that if
I were to move to, for example, Germany, and get a job with the
Bundesliga, that would cover my rent, salary and food and
everything like that and I then could make tons of money just
playing in tournaments, doing wonderfully, as opposed to
travelling back and forth.

And the reason why that decision became so critical is the
amount of chess information that is available in Europe in
comparison to the United States. I mean, I would play against
European colleagues who would come to tournaments and be telling
me about what they did last week and what Fred did the month
before and what Gary did then, etc. They seemed to know
everything and I was totally in the dark. I'd be sitting at
dinner and I'd be the only guy not saying a word, because
everything was fresh. And of course, their novelties and their
knowledge of the chess openings was so much more intense than
mine. I was really out of it. I mean I was a professional
amateur compared to these fellows.

So a decision had to be made. Quite frankly I am a man who has a
deep attachment to my family and loved ones and my friends are a
life support for me. I love America, I don't speak another
language which really hurts if you are a non-European because
most Europeans seem to be born speaking three, four, upwards of
seven languages. I was moronic next to my colleagues, who were
fluent in German, French and Spanish, what have you. And so I
made a very, very critical decision. The decision I made was "I
want to live in the United States. I want my home here."

But, I cannot injure myself through this lack of chess
information. So I subscribed to all the magazines, all the
European literature. I was a keen supporter of a lot of these
magazines because they were my source of information. Whatever I
could do to help these magazines, and insure my subscription I
should add, was very important to me. In this world, the
Informants played a very important role.

Nonetheless, I was still out of it. What I began to put together
with a group of friends, which included Wendy Starbuck, Jeremy
Silman and Hal Bogner was the idea of founding a magazine - it
was at that time that "Players Chess News" had its demise, 1987
- and we began kicking around ideas and eventually we thought up
a business plan and we were all set. And then nothing happened
for months. I was travelling and so on and so forth. Finally I
said, "You guys have dropped the ball," and in July of 1987 I
established I.C.E. with the idea that in January, 1988, we would
publish our first issue of "Inside Chess." I wanted "Inside
Chess" to be essentially what it would become, an information
network here in the United States, of all the great chess
happenings. I felt that by doing a magazine and hiring a staff
of people that would do most of the work load, I would have my
finger on the chess pulse of the world. I would become instantly
the most informed American chess player, which was exactly the
case.

HWR: Are you saying it actually developed, initially, as a way
for you to obtain more chess information, to bolster your own
international chess career?

YS: Precisely right. Absolutely on the button. That is exactly
what was going on in my mind.

HWR: Of course, you made a terrible mistake, because it became a
success in its own right.

YS: Yes and no. And also, I underestimated totally the amount of
work that goes into making a chess magazine. I can only say
this: Whatever anyone's imagination of making the magazine is
like, in terms of workload, don't double it, don't triple it,
quadruple it! I mean, it's amazing the amount of hours you spend
doing something that never gets put in the magazine. That's just
a "for instance." And it's amazing the amount of hours spent
that have absolutely nothing to do with the magazine, from
getting second class permits, to printing, to labelling, to
subscription order-taking, to brochures and marketing and
setting up the magazine, advertising, and everything you can
imagine suddenly squeezed out hours, when I was thinking, "Hey,
this is going to be a cinch. All you gotta do is put pen to
paper and it comes out right!" [Laughs]

So, all I can say is that 1988, our first year, was a horrible
learning experience and our timing could not have been worse.
The world of chess is littered with corpses of chess magazines.
A lot of people don't realize that Paul Morphy was, I would say,
a contributing editor to a magazine for a number of years.
Emanuel Lasker had his magazine, Wilhelm Steinitz magazines he
worked with. All the Russian world champions at one time or
another did editorial work for "64" and a lot of these magazines
I've mentioned (not "64" - I didn't mean to confuse that) but
Morphy, Steinitz, Lasker's magazines failed, all failed, after a
number of years. Again, I have seen so many magazines, "Blitz
Chess," "International Chess" a number of other names are
swimming past my eyes as I think about magazines that have come
and gone.

HWR: You are right. There have been dozens. You must be aware of
the observation by [former world champion Mikhail] Botvinnik
made a good number of years ago. He maintains that a chessplayer
really is subject to a baptism by fire when he writes and
annotates and then is subject to the criticism of others who
read it. Did this thought of his enter into it at all or was it,
again, just to accumulate this information so that you could
play an overall better game of chess?

YS: Yes, I was aware of Botvinnik's quote and I was aware of
many people who warned me, Jeremy [Silman], to his credit,
constantly said, "You don't know what you're getting into!" At
that time the magazine was going to be established in L.A. What
was going through my mind was yes, I would annotate my games, I
would be subject to the vagaries of criticism or compliments and
I felt that it would hone my game. But I think Botvinnik made
the right statement in what he was saying. But I went a little
too far. In other words, he's probably saying, "Annotate a game,
spend ten hours annotating the game, show your total
understanding of what was going on, and then put it out there."

Instead, what was happening to me, was that I was putting far
more hours into writing, and so a lot of things were getting
passed. In other words, it was not as if I could just sit down
and lovingly caress each move and say how wonderful and
thoughtful it was. There was a deadline. No, it was like,
"C'mon, Yaz, we need this, send us ten pages quickly, get it
over here!" So it was "Here's my thoughts, folks. I hope they
are right. Tell me if I'm wrong."

HWR: It has been my opinion that one of the main reasons that
this magazine is so well received is that it comes out every two
weeks and the news is very fresh.

YS: That's right. That is what I felt needed to be done. In
fact, my original vision, which I have not lost track of, was a
weekly. I do believe that the databases, the fax machines,
telecommunications, modems, everything has let up information to
the point that it is going by so fast. A monthly is just simply
not enough. It is just not enough. You're not even close. With
concerns about printers and things like that, your news is two
months old. By the time the subscriber reads the news it's
ancient history.

HWR: That's true. That has been the bane of "Chess Life" which
has improved drastically over the last couple of years, but
still has this time lag.

YS: Correct. And there is nothing they can do about it and so
they try to compensate by getting as many interesting and
informative articles as they can. They're not going to give you
the latest breaking news, but they are going to give a nice
story.

HWR: Yes, I think that's true. In any event, you take on this
really Herculean task, coming out every two weeks. Then, not
only are you playing, but you branch out into book publishing
and into "active" ratings and then you occasionally get into
authoring a book published by perhaps a connected but really
independent company. I'm thinking of, really a good book for
beginners, the "Winning Chess Tactics" book, which I favorably
reviewed.

Why chess publishing, and I will tell you something that is not
known by the general public yet, there is a list of books coming
out that have been nominated for "Book of the Year" for 1992 and
on that list is Orlov's "Black Knights Tango" [published by
Seirawan's company I.C.E.] In my opinion it is on there because
it is a rare combination of original analysis and a willingness
to take a chance with real analysis - he puts his neck out
there. You are in very good company by the way with the "Oxford
Companion to Chess," Soltis' two-volume series on opening ideas
and analysis which is excellent and a couple of others. This may
seem to be question which begs the obvious, but is this just a
natural branch of magazine publishing?

YS: Well, in fact, it does beg the obvious, because, like you
say, the Herculean task of producing, every two weeks, "Inside
Chess," takes so much time, where do I find the time to write
and publish our own books and things like that. The answer
really is obvious: I have a marvelous staff. An absolutely
brilliant core group of people. Mike Franett, John Donaldson,
Eric Woro, Ralph Dubisch, Rusty Miller, April Jenkins, Yvette
Nagel. Oh boy, I'm going to forget so many other people. Just,
honestly, I have this professional chess career. It does still
take me six to seven months on the road and I play against the
world's best players and simultaneously I am doing these other
things. I can't do it, it's quite clear, and without these
people I would be totally, totally over my head - I couldn't do
it.

HWR: I'm assuming from a business standpoint, and I wondered
about it when I saw it originally come into being, I'm assuming
the Active Ratings simply was a money-loser.

YS: Yeah. Okay, let me just say how the book publishing came
into being. Essentially, we have a desktop. We use Ventura
Desktop Publishing systems, we have laser printers, computers,
chess players, chess authors, a lot of people who are just ready
to make a book. We are ready to make magazines and it was just a
natural evolution that we should try to publish the books. We
started with a correspondence book, "Diamond Dust," a very good
book by Jonathan Berry. I like it a lot.

I love [IM] Dr. Minev and he's a ferret. He goes through all of
these games, from ancient, ancient classics and he ferrets out
all of these lovely little tactical quizzes and combinations. I
spent so many afternoons just being entertained, that we had to
make a combination book of these rooks, sacrificing rooks. A
very rare combination.

HWR: That was not a bad book either. I liked your effort (I
don't know to what extent who contributed what) in the "Alekhine
in the Americas" book.

YS: That was a marvelous monograph.

HWR: Although you didn't come out and say it expressly in the
book, it seemed to be the first of a series.

YS: Yes. We hope to being doing more of that. That's correct.

HWR: Although we can have honest differences of opinion, I
thought the book by Fauber was a lemon. I don't know if you saw
my review of it.

YS: I did. I loved the book. [Laughs]

HWR: Well, reasonable men can differ. I found two things, and
maybe you want to comment on this. In a book, entitled "Impact
of Genius," how can you possibly not have any material on
Mikhail Tal? How is that possible in a book like this?

YS: Exactly. I mean we can quibble. That one was a weakness. A
terrible weakness. I think what Fauber's intent was, in this
particular case, Tal had not retired. He felt perhaps that Tal
had a lot more to add to his illustrious chess career. I don't
think Richard wanted to speak about Tal in any past tense.

HWR: There are other players who are mentioned who are still
active.

YS: For example?

HWR: Well, of course, Fischer was mentioned.

YS: [Laughs] Of course, who knew Bobby was going to return!?

HWR: Botvinnik.

YS: He retired. But you're right. I think even a 50-year old Tal
needed to be, well, my love for Misha, I'm with you on this one.

HWR: In my opinion, you cannot exclude Tal from a book like
this. The other thing, and I don't want to dwell on it too much,
it was riddled with a lot of factual errors and I think Jon
Berry, your editor, took somewhat of a defensive posture about
that. Part of my job, I think, when I review these things is to
say, "Hey look, this is not correct." Rather than get defensive
I guess you just try to have to do better the next time. It
reads easily but the question is whether you want to produce,
and don't take this as a cheap shot, a book of fiction or a book
of history.

YS: Exactly. Well, I mean, the factual errors that your review
pointed out were telling and very well taken. It's quite clear a
factual error is a horrible oversight. It's indefensible and I
won't even try it. I found, about the book, which I enjoyed so
much, I really liked Richard's style of writing. I think he is
an entertaining writer with wonderful prose. It reads so easily.
It wasn't a dry historical tome. It really moved.

HWR: I don't disagree with that and I don't want to dwell on it,
but there's a difference between it reading well and it being
correct. Okay?

YS: Well, sure, but we're talking well over 300 pages. A number
of factual errors that you pointed out are there but it doesn't
kill the book.

HWR: It wasn't one of my favorites, but so be it.

YS: Then came something else. We publish our own books, we will
have like nine titles, we have two titles at the printer that
are coming back. One is, if you will, a kind of "Inside Chess"
openings, like a Batsford Chess Openings. A single handbook
citing games right through 1992 and of course, the book "No
Regrets" which is the book about the Fischer-Spassky match.

HWR: I look forward to reviewing that. I have already seen Jack
Peters book and I don't know if the Hays book is out yet.

YS: I think it will be out shortly. It was just a natural
extension of our business growing that books became just an
obvious choice of packaging the information. Basically, what we
sell is chess information. We package it in chess magazines,
books, we package it in software. That's what the consumer is
buying from us, chess information. They want some fresh and
interesting and new and so on and that's what we provide.

What I saw with the World Rapid Chess Ratings, what my vision
was and still is today, I haven't lost this at all, was when I
started the WRC, I believe it was 1990 when FIDE and ICE came to
terms and allowed us to administer this worldwide rating system,
was the need to bring the media into the game. By that I thought
that blitz chess was too much, it was overwhelming. I'm speaking
specifically about five-minutes. But I thought that thirty
minutes per player per game was ideal. The game is packaged in
an hour or less and that everybody loves it, people who are
professionals outside of chess can come and go very quickly. Get
their "fix" if you will for the evening or the weekend and go
their way. And so I wanted to promote rapid chess back then and
I wanted it to be done very badly but I didn't want to do it! I
wanted the U.S. Chess Federation to do it.

In 1988 at a meeting in Boston, it was the annual general
assembly of the delegates in Boston, I argued vehemently that
the USCF do it but they did not want to start a separate rating
system for what was called "Active Chess." So, I was a big
promoter of active chess, rapid chess, and today, if you look
around the world, you'll see that rapid chess has grown
enormously, enormously. Rapid chess would have been used in the
U.S. championship as a tiebreak for the Interzonals, it was used
in the candidates matches. Those matches determined who would be
the challenger for the world champion. So rapid chess is
accepted in those mediums. The most prestigious tournament in
the world, Interpolis, the Tilburg tournament, used rapid chess
as a tie-breaker. Mickey Adams won 100,000 guilders, which was
$56,000 for his first prize victory there. He also won the
Brussels GMA Rapid Chess Challenger which S.W.I.F.T. sponsored.

HWR: I don't think there is any question that it is out there
being used. I guess it wasn't economically viable for I.C.E.

YS: What happened in our particular case, and again, my vision
was that we would administer this rating system, that all the
people who subscribed to "Inside Chess" could see their rating
on their label, we would do these quarterly ratings and
everything would be marvelous, it was this wonderful synergy.
What happened was that rapid chess was very quickly accepted by
the players and the players enjoyed it, but the organizers
desperately, desperately fought against the WRC concept. The
organizers did not like sending in rating reports to ourselves,
they did like the fees associated with the WRC, which I thought
were very inexpensive.

HWR: Did you feel you were competing in some way with the USCF?

YS: In fact, I did. The USCF, I don't understand their
thick-headedness about this topic. There is no way in my mind
that you should rate thirty-minute chess with tournament chess.
Because, in my mind, they are two completely separate games as
is blitz, which is a third separate game. Now the difference was
that in Walter Browne's case, he rates five-minute chess, he
wasn't in direct competition with the USCF because they don't
rate five-minute chess, whereas when the WRC was started, the
USCF had made that decision, and they had made it as early as
1988, that they would rate rapid chess within the framework of
their tournament regular ratings. I just thought that was
terrible, terrible, terrible. And so, when we started rating
thirty-minute chess, as an independent, we were absolutely
competing against the USCF. But I didn't think it was a
competition at all.

First of all, the USCF is violating the rules of FIDE, to which
they belong, about rapid chess. FIDE clearly says you will not
rate rapid chess within the ordinary rating system. But the USCF
doesn't care, and apparently neither do any of its members.
[Laughs] Because I seem to be the most outspoken on this topic.

HWR: So the result is a smoking hulk of your active rating
system.

YS: Well, eventually yes and no, because we put together what I
consider some brilliant software, we invested an enormous
amount of money in the development of the software, software
development is very expensive. We allowed organizers to send us
their tournaments by data. We would then rate and send back
crosstables and so forth. And in fact the competition forced the
U.S. Chess Federation to rewrite their own rating code. Today,
you can send your tournaments to be rated by the USCF on
diskette and I think we were responsible for pushing them in
what I consider a very positive direction. So the competition
was good for the USCF. It financially, was an absolute loss, a
real, real loss. At the time that I started it, I was hoping it
would be a money-winner. I thought that there would be an
investment for a several-year period and that eventually it
would pick up. We invested this money through 1990 and 1991 and
then came 1992 which I thought was going to, say, double
revenues. In fact, we had a revenue loss for 1992 from 1991. In
fact, it was going in reverse. As a public company, you can't
justify that to the shareholders no matter how deeply you
believe in your own visions.

HWR: OK, I was reading what I thought was, in general, as far as
the events which were taking place on the chessboard, really
very timely, great annotations on the Fischer-Spassky match. I
then read that you unabashedly call Bobby Fischer "World
Champion" and Gary Kasparov "FIDE Champion." I almost broke my
hip because I fell off the chair! Would you like to elaborate a
little bit on that?

YS: I don't think it needs that much elaboration. As I wrote in
"Inside Chess" that's my view. Bobby was never defeated. The
fact that he didn't play for twenty years probably goes a long
way to explain that. I felt that Bobby's contribution to chess
from 1972 and what chess had become and what his contribution
meant to the world of chess, to me he was the Muhammed Ali of
chess. When I started chess he was a chessic hero, of course,
why not? The fact that he didn't play because he didn't get his
conditions was not his fault. He had always demanded perfection
in chess and quite often never got it and sometimes he moved
things forward. I felt that the fact that he hadn't been
defeated, he had been stripped of his title was unfair, and so
for me he is world champion.

HWR: Let me offer a thought to you. I am not necessarily asking
you right now to change your opinion, but I am going to pursue
it a little bit more. Let me tell you that several years ago I
acquired for my collection of chess documents, which is now
between 13,000 and 14,000, all the papers of Ed Edmondson. I
acquired that from his widow. Edmondson had the interesting
habit of keeping memoranda of phone conversations that he had
which memoranda were made at the time he was having or had just
had the conversations. He was with Fischer at the end of March
and the beginning of April 1975. [The International Chess
Federation, FIDE, stripped Fischer of his title on April 3,
1975, when it could not reach agreement with Fischer on
conditions under which the 1975 title match should be held]. I
believe after reviewing documents that no one else in the
world has seen, except for perhaps Mrs. Edmondson and Ed
himself, that Fischer would never have played. And that means
even if FIDE had said, "OK we agree to everything," and if
Karpov had said, "I agree to everything." Question: Would that
change your opinion if that were the case?

YS: It would shake it tremendously. You may be right. Let me
just say this. Perhaps, at that particular time, no set of
circumstance would have forced Bobby to play. And perhaps he
used FIDE's reluctance to pass an unlimited fixed win [match] as
an excuse. Maybe he hung his hat on that and was happy and he
did that. But, we don't know that as an absolute. Bobby has
already shown that he was willing to play to the first ten wins.
His recent performance shows that he is willing to play now,
twenty years later. I believe, but I can't prove this, I think
that Ed kept perfect notes and was probably convinced in his
heart of hearts that Bobby would not have played under any set
of conditions.

HWR: That's not Ed's opinion, that's my opinion based on what I
think is a very good record made by Edmondson.

YS: Bobby had a lot of problems in 1975 and probably has a lot
more problems today. [Laughs] I just feel that, to me, he has a
claim on the title of world champion. I think it is totally
legitimate. I believe Gary feels that way. His "New In Chess"
interviews indicate so and we quoted him in "Inside Chess."

HWR: Well, let's pursue that a little bit. Can we agree, and
maybe we can't, objectively, forgetting titles conferred by any
organization, Fischer is still an extremely strong grandmaster.
Based however, on an examination of the games he played against
Spassky, he is not the strongest player in the world anymore?

YS: I would say you're absolutely right and in the same breath,
would also say that the quality of the games, of some of the
games, indicate to me that he has the potential of being
probably the best challenger for Gary Kasparov. Let me just stop
right there and say this: If Gary Kasparov is the best
chessplayer in the world as he has proven this last five, six,
seven years, then is Nigel Short or Jan Timman his best
challenger. And the answer probably is no. If not, then who? My
answer to that would be Anatoly Karpov, Vassily Ivanchuk, Boris
Gelfand and Viswanathan Anand all come immediately to mind as
potentially better challengers than Timman or Short, but, if
they were all to lose, and I think that they all would in terms
of Gary being a big favorite, then who, besides that group of
people I mentioned would be a good challenger? And I think
Fischer would be a better challenger than any of them.

HWR: OK, I hear what you are saying, but let me clarify this a
little, pin you down.

YS: My suit of armor is on! It is getting heavy!

HWR: Are you saying Fischer is the second strongest player in
the world at this moment? Because I don't think he is.

YS: No. I don't either.

HWR: Would you put him in the top ten?

YS: Yes.

HWR: Can you be more specific?

YS: I would say at the end of the top ten. I would not put him
in the top five. I would put him in the top ten. I would
"guesstimate" his strength between 2660 and 2680 and I once
again would say that was his performance [rating], in my eyes,
for his defeating Boris Spassky 10-5 with 15 draws. I would
further say this, that Bobby has the potential of being in the
2700's and potentially higher than that. But more than that I
would say that even though he may not be in the world's top
five, he is the best challenger to Kasparov when you think
Karpov, Anand, Gelfand, Ivanchuk would all at this moment lose
to Kasparov. I think that Fischer would change the dynamics such
that people would believe that Kasparov, well let's say, would
have a tougher fight on his hands.

HWR: He might have a tougher fight, but ...

YS: That doesn't make him the second best player in the world
because he is going to give Gary Kasparov a tough fight.

HWR: Aren't we really saying here that the presence of Fischer
across the board from Kasparov at a world title match would
really be the most interesting?

YS: For me, it's a non-issue. It's an absolute. Having Gary
Kasparov sit there knowing that every move he makes twenty
million dollars may or may not be at stake, thirty million or
however much they play for, having the entire tension of the
chess world and the non-chess world sitting there, plugged in,
zoned in, I think, would just be THE match.

HWR: So, is it a fair statement, and I don't want to put words
in your mouth, but that is of course exactly what I am doing,
although today, or in the next six months, for example, Short
may be objectively stronger than Fischer, Ivanchuk, Gelfand or
Anand, in fact the most interesting, dynamic match might be with
Fischer in spite of that?

YS: Correct.

HWR: Let's pursue your coverage of the match. I canvas all major
English-language chess publications. I survey them, the stuff
gets posted. I have to tell you that "Inside Chess" was the only
major English-language chess publication which did not seriously
come to grips with what was going on off the chess board. You
have taken some shots from other grandmasters. I can think of
two offhand, from other publications, for ignoring some of the
horrors that were going on while this match was taking place.
Would you care to comment on that, please?

YS: Well, when I think in terms of "horrors" taking place, I
think in terms of a civil war in the Balkans. I speak
specifically of the Bosnia Hercegovina crisis and the siege of
Sarajevo.

HWR: We see pictures of concentration camps.

YS: Precisely. I think in the pages of "Inside Chess" I've made
many references to the civil war and the barbarism and the
tragedy that is Yugoslavia today.

HWR: My opinion as a reviewer was that you had a few passing
references. I remember your tour, seeing the jewels in the
monastery and saying what a contrast it was. But you never
really came to grips with the issue of should this match be
taking place under these conditions.

YS: Well, I think the answer to that question is absolutely no,
it shouldn't have been. I think possibly outside of Baghdad, it
was the worst possible choice of sites in the world.

HWR: Don't you see what happens at that point? Because you don't
become outspoken like virtually every other major publication
did, people sit back and say, "Why is he doing this? Is his
silence tacit consent or approval?"

YS: Absolutely not. For me and for Bobby both the tragedy, and
for the entire Yugoslavian people, the tragedy is horrifying.
It's a terrible, terrible situation. I was there in November of
1991. I personally saw thousands of refugees at the train
station in Belgrade. I saw the misery. I'm very, very close to a
large number of people of Croatia, Bosnia.

HWR: But you never wrote about it in terms that let the public,
who was reading your magazine say "My god, this nightmare is
going on..."

YS: I disagree. It is your opinion that I made passing
references, but I don't share your opinion. I think I did, on
several occasions, point out the terrible tragedy and my own
sadness at it. I feel that at "Inside Chess" magazine we are not
a political commentary magazine. I wasn't there, say, as a
"Times" reporter, but really as a chess reporter. If you want to
understand the tragedy of what is going on in Bosnia, the sad
tragedy of what is going on in Bosnia, "Inside Chess" is not
your source and it shouldn't be.

HWR: I agree with that, but how do you respond to the people who
say the following, and your opinion is that your coverage of the
events off the board was adequate and I don't think it was.
However, what do you say to people who say: "Yasser's failure to
disavow some of the things that Fischer was saying or take more
moralistic stance on the surroundings, amounted to tacit
approval." That's what is being said. How do you respond to
those people?

YS: OK, Hanon, let's just clarify your question, because we move
from the war, the tragedy of the war and we have now moved to
Fischer. So the war is no longer part of your question, right?

HWR: Let's wrap up that to at least both of our satisfaction.
You believe that your coverage was enough and that your
references to what was going on, in the civil war, in the
concentration camps, Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, all that was
adequate. And, reasonable people may differ, other people may
think it wasn't, but that part of it you feel was adequate.

YS: Correct. Again, let's just be clear. I don't think my
comment was well understood by you. Once again, my coverage of
the Fischer-Spassky match was not coverage of the Bosnian
conflict on the ground. I didn't visit Sarajevo. I wasn't there
to cover the civil war. And let's call it that. It is a civil
war with atrocious human sufferings. It boggles the mind. I was
constantly aware of that, in terms of the daily newspaper
coverage, in terms of the television, CNN, in terms of my
friends and people I spoke with. Oh yes, I lived through it, but
I did not see my role as being that of "Well, now that I'm in
Yugoslavia, let's talk about the civil war." That was never my
intention at any time.

HWR: So, if I wanted to find out more about the civil war...

YS: Please, read the "New York Times!"

HWR: "Newsweek" or whatever.

YS: Exactly! I mean, but if you wanted my opinion of who's at
fault and things like that, I'd be glad to write such an essay.
Perhaps I should write it for the "New York Times."

HWR: Do you think you should have said, clearly, that the match
shouldn't be taking place there, and, having taken that
position, then go on to cover the match?

YS: I could have taken that position. I didn't think it was
necessary. My feeling is that reasonable people around the world
would say, "Why in the world is a chess match taking place in a
place that is undergoing civil war?" I think if anybody
approached it from that perspective, they say, "It shouldn't
be!"

HWR: I think what you are saying is correct but I think one of
the reasons you are being criticized is that YOU didn't say
that.

YS: I don't know if it was politically correct of me to say that
at a time Yugoslavia is going through its worse crisis in modern
history, the civil war is wracking the country, why in the world
is this chess match taking place? But since it is and I'm here
let's cover it. I didn't say that because I thought it was
pretty obvious. Because I didn't say this you read between the
lines that I in fact tacitly support the civil war.

HWR: This is what is being said. I think you know it is out
there.

YS: Oddly enough, this is the first time that I have heard that
I tacitly approve the nightmare that is Bosnia.

HWR: It is clear that you had certain ideas either about the
adequacy or the propriety of the coverage.

YS: We have gotten more letters on our particular coverage of
Fischer-Spassky than anything we have ever done, and rightfully
so, because I believe it is the top chess story of the last
seven, eight years. Out of all the letters we have gotten, I
would say, off the top of my head, by the ratio of three to one,
our readers have just commended us for our coverage and
simultaneously those who felt that I had mistakenly done
something, praised Bobby too much or perhaps did something
wrong, the ratio is easily three to one with those who felt our
coverage was excellent. Not just adequate, but excellent, as
opposed to those who felt we should have done something better
or done something we didn't do.

HWR: [American Grandmaster and Editor-In-Chief of "Chess Chow"]
Joel Benjamin was not unclear. He didn't use your name or that
of "Inside Chess" directly, but there could be no mistake about
what was going on. I sent you copies of some of what he wrote. I
don't know if you have read others. Please let me hear what your
response is.

YS: I consider Joel Benjamin a very good friend. He has
certainly come out to Seattle, and we've worked together and
trained together and played at Olympics together and many U.S.
Championships. We have gotten a chance to spend a lot of time
together. We genuinely like each other's company and I think it
was "Inside Chess" and what we have done with the magazine that
influenced Joel to say, "Let me start 'Chess Chow' because
"Inside Chess" does not take into account this humorous side of
chess" which we all know it exists but very little attention is
paid to it. I think in some ways I inspired him to go out and do
this. I consider myself very close to Joel.

I thought Joel's comments in "Chess Chow" were extremely bad.
Extremely bad. I felt that he was not being honest with himself.
He wrote that we ["Chess Chow"] did not dispatch a correspondent
to Sveti Stefan and no one at our staff at "Chess Chow" wants to
speak with Bobby Fischer. And I just looked at that and I said,
"What!?" No chessplayer who works at "Chess Chow" would like
to speak with Fischer? Wow! I was stunned that he would say
that.

The other thing that I found very, very stunning and certainly
wrong, was what Joel did concerning Bobby's views about Jewish
people. Joel had this heading, sub-heading, that said "Little
Hitler." Joel went on and just lambasted the guy. I mean, to my
mind, let me make this perfectly clear, when you think in terms
of the entire history of mankind, and maybe there have been a
billion people that ever have graced the planet earth, one of
the names of the most evil person who has ever existed in the
history of mankind has to be the name of Hitler. And to compare
Bobby to Hitler, to my knowledge, Bobby has never murdered
anybody, he has never gassed anybody, he has never bludgeoned
people to death. And to make the association is not totally
unfair but it is totally libelous. Bobby is a racist, he is not
a Nazist.

HWR: Well, wait a minute now. Let us distinguish between Fischer
on the sixty-four squares and away from the board. Some of the
statements which he has made are incredulous. Not only are they
rabidly anti-Semitic, but he then drones on about the denial of
the holocaust and all that stuff.

YS: What particular press conference and comments are you
thinking about when he denied the holocaust?

HWR: In general his anti-Semitic remarks.

YS: Be very careful about that because, I mean, in our book "No
Regrets" every public word that Bobby uttered at Sveti Stefan
and at Belgrade is included. All the nine press conferences.

HWR: We will get to that in a minute.

YS: OK, but I just wanted to say that in all my time in talks
with Bobby, and we spoke about the Jewish question at great
length, he never denied the holocaust to me directly. Let's put
it that way. He is definitely a racist. I don't mean to be an
apologist for him, but I think we have to be clear about what he
said and what he didn't say and what you infer.

HWR: He has, if not at this particular event, he has denied the
holocaust.

YS: I don't know that as an absolute, but go ahead.

HWR: I would like to follow up with a quick side question. When
you said you discussed with Bobby "the Jewish question" - What
Jewish question? What do you mean by "THE Jewish question?"

YS: Frankly, Bobby clearly is a very complicated person. We
spent about fifteen hours together. I totalled it up. I didn't
take notes during our conversation, but the that diary I kept at
Sveti Stefan was very meticulous and I used that in the book
that I wrote. To me, he's got a lot of chips on his shoulders,
he doesn't like Russian players, he doesn't like the U.S.
government, he doesn't like the media, he doesn't like Jewish
people. Now, all of these other questions I can rationalize and
I can understand why he doesn't want to pay federal taxes, who
does? I can understand his bitterness against FIDE. I can
understand his bitterness toward chess players who have cheated
in games and so forth and so on. But what I could not in any way
understand is his racism against Jewish people. We spoke about
where did this all come from? Why does he have these racist
views against Jewish people that he professes? And he does so
openly at these press conferences. He just says, "I don't like
the Jews, I don't like this, I don't like that about them.

HWR: What explanation did he give you?

YS: His answer was very interesting. He explained to me that
when he was raised, he was raised in a Jewish household, that he
was basically abandoned by his father and you could say that
although he lived with his mother Regina, she went on to her
education studies, left two children, he and his sister, home,
and he was very much abandoned as a child. I think that this
terrible experience of being abandoned as a child certainly
affected him throughout his entire life. But also the fact, the
way he explained it to me, is he was brought up in a chess
community in Manhattan, he had to have a lot of savvy, a lot of
smarts, and there was an enormous number of Jewish people in the
chess world, in New York, that he interfaced with, that he
communicated with on a constant day-to-day basis, many of whom
helped him, and he acknowledges that. A little entry fee here, a
book there, a ride there, and so forth and so on. But he also
says that many, many he has had business affairs with Jewish
businessmen which have not worked out. And he said that as a
result of these experiences, and I don't know if he is talking
about Piatigorsky or something else, as a result, as he put, it
of these many, many experiences, his answer is "I don't want to
deal with Jews anymore. That's just the way it is. Yasser, I'm
sorry, it's a closed question."

I said, "But now wait a minute, Bobby, here comes into the world
a beautiful little baby, just born, to a Jewish mother and a
Jewish father, and you're going to condemn this child because of
the mother and the father?" He says, "No! No! I'm not condemning
the child, I condemn what the child is going to become." It is
almost like in his view the child is going to be cursed because
it is raised in this Jewish environment and the child will
eventually become a Zionist and go on to do all these bad things
to people.

And I said, "But Bobby, I mean here you are, a man who speaks
many languages, you are cultured, you have travelled, you know a
great deal about the world. That's just an impossible thing to
grasp. You're condemning a whole group of people." And he says,
"Yasser, I know you think I'm unfair. It's just my experience.
My reasons." I could not break through to him on that level. I
mean atomic bombs could not separate him from those particular
views, because he holds them and they are real to them. And
nothing I could say could dissuade him. To me that is the
biggest tragedy about Bobby's return to the chessboard. He is
obviously this brilliant chessplayer, but he has this terrible,
terrible awkwardness about Jewish people. It's just terrible.
That's the worst thing. It's a tragedy.

HWR: Do you think it causes him to see ghosts where there are
none?

YS: Oh, unquestionably. I don't know exactly how his mind works.
He takes a different approach to things and he magnifies his
problems out of proportion. He takes his problems and puts them
on the world stage and he magnifies them. For example, one of
the real problems that came out of the press conference was the
fact that he heavily condemned these Soviet publishers who took
his book "Sixty Memorable Games," translated it and pirated it
and sold 50,000 copies. He says these same publishers also
published a book by Gary Kasparov and since he [Fischer] never
got any royalties and Kasparov did, in his mind, the publisher
has used money that was his to pay Gary. He says, "Therefore one
could say that Gary owes me money."

Well, I just laughed and laughed and laughed when we had this
particular conversation, because I said, "Bobby that's absurd!."
[End, Part I]

Coming up in Part II, Yasser continues to discuss Bobby Fischer,
discusses World Champion Gary Kasparov and his impact on chess
and also reflects on the recent U.S. Championship and chess in
the U.S. in general.